urrounded by
circumstances more solemn. I am not going to try to excite your
feelings about them. Consider only for yourself what that seeing of
the Egyptians "dead upon the sea-shore" meant to every soul that saw
it. And then reflect that these intense emotions of mingled horror,
triumph, and gratitude were expressed, in the visible presence of the
Deity, by music and dancing. If you answer that you do not believe the
Egyptians so perished, or that God ever appeared in a pillar of cloud,
I reply, "Be it so--believe or disbelieve, as you choose;--This is yet
assuredly the fact, that the author of the poem or fable of the Exodus
supposed that, under such circumstances of Divine interposition as he
had invented, the triumph of the Israelitish women would have been,
and ought to have been, under the direction of a prophetess,
expressed by music and dancing."

42. Nor was it possible that he should think otherwise, at whatever
period he wrote; both music and dancing being, among all great ancient
nations, an appointed and very principal part of the worship of the
gods.

And that very theatrical entertainment at which I sate thinking over
these things for you--that pantomime, which depended throughout for
its success on an appeal to the vices of the lower London populace,
was, in itself, nothing but a corrupt remnant of the religious
ceremonies which guided the most serious faiths of the Greek mind, and
laid the foundation of their gravest moral and didactic--more forcibly
so because at the same time dramatic--literature.

43. Returning to the Jewish history, you find soon afterwards this
enthusiastic religious dance and song employed, in their more common
and habitual manner, in the idolatries under Sinai; but beautifully
again and tenderly, after the triumph of Jephthah, "And behold his
daughter came out to meet him with timbrels and with dances." Again,
still more notably, at the triumph of David with Saul, "the women came
out of all the cities of Israel singing and dancing to meet King Saul
with tabrets, with joy, and with instruments of music." And you have
this joyful song and dance of the virgins of Israel not only
incidentally alluded to in the most solemn passages of Hebrew
religious poetry (as in Psalm lxviii. 24, 25, and Psalm cxlix. 2, 3),
but approved, and the restoration of it promised as a sign of God's
perfect blessing, most earnestly by the saddest of the Hebrew
prophets, and in one of the most beautiful